In this episode Saifedean talks to bitcoin developer and author Jimmy Song about programming and Jimmy’s new book Thank God for Bitcoin, which explores bitcoin from a Christian perspective. They discuss how Jimmy’s Python coding skills helped him to get a job at a bitcoin company in 2013, and what benefits learning to code can bring to bitcoiners. In their discussion of Thank God for Bitcoin they cover how money affects our morality and time preference. They tackle questions such as whether it is ethical to go into debt, whether Western civilisation started to decline after going off the gold standard, and whether Karl Marx was inspired by the character of the devil in Goethe’s Faust.

Related links:

• The Little Bitcoin Book
• Mises Institute article on Nicole Oresme
• The Ethics of Money Production by Guido Holsman. Reference to “reverse transubstantiation” is made on pages 162-164
• The Bitcoin Standard Podcast episode with Harris Irfan
• Fiat Fuels chapter of The Fiat Standard, passage on per capita energy consumption
• Website with metrics on economic and social changes that have taken place since the Nixon shock
• Saifedean Ammous’ 2017 paper on technological regression in the aviation industry including, Federation Aeronautique Internationale world flight speed records
• Jeffery Tucker: article on dishwasher
• Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire including the five signs of civilizational decay
• The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival by Sir John Bagot Glubb

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